Georgia court throws out legislature-imposed ceiling on court-awarded damages

Word that the Supreme Court for the state of Georgia had thrown out as unconstitutional a state law limiting the amount of damages that could be awarded to victims of medical malpractice raises the possibility of the return of respect for civil rights for all U.S. residents. Monday's ruling found the law, which capped damages for pain and suffering at $350,000, violated the constitutional right to trial by jury because it limited the right of juries to determine the outcome of lawsuits. “The very existence of the caps, in any amount, is violative of the right to trial by jury,” Chief Justice Carol Hunstein wrote in the unanimous decision, according to the New York Times. The ruling upheld a lower court's decision that found the statute unconstitutional because it prevented Betty Nestlehutt, a Marietta, Ga., real estate agent disfigured by unsuccessful facelift surgery, from receiving the full $1.26 million in damages awarded by an Atlanta jury after she sued her doctor. The verdict included $900,000 in compensation for pain and suffering. “The bedrock of our democracy — our ability to self-govern at the ballot box and in the jury box — remains intact,” said Adam Malone, the lawyer who represented Nestlehutt. Of course not everyone agreed with the decision. Atlanta Oculoplastic Surgery, the physicians group that performed the surgery, could not be reached for comment, the Times said. But a leading Georgia Republican, Nathan Deal, who resigned from his long-held seat in the U.S. Congress last week to run for governor, criticized the ruling as "a setback" for Republican-led tort reform efforts in the state, according to WGCL-TV, the CBS affiliate in Atlanta. "This ruling is a setback for the effort to reduce health care costs for Georgians," Deal said. "This is important to all Georgians. Tort reform helps reduce the cost of health care to individuals and stops doctors from leaving our state, as they did prior to its passage." Thirty states and the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico have imposed caps on jury awards in malpractice cases, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Times said. Such caps have been struck down by courts in New Hampshire, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin and Illinois since the 1980s.

Obama decision on nuclear power is potentially volatile compromise

Certainly being president of all the people means having to do things that may disappoint your supporters but benefit the country as a whole. That, certainly, is behind U.S. President Barack Obama's repeated entreaties to the Republican Party minorities in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, despite his Democratic Party's majorities in both. And that probably explains his thinking Monday, when an unnamed official told the Reuters international news service that he would announce an $8.3 billion loan guarantee to help the Southern Co. of Atlanta build two nuclear reactors. But there should be, one would hope, a limit to the number of basic principles you're willing to surrender. Healthcare reform appears to have been inadvisedly compromised away, so expansion of the civilian nuclear power industry would have been a very good place to start holding the line. There's a good reason no nuclear power plants have been built in the United States for 30 years -- even besides the nearly incalculable damage that a major accident could cause, nuclear waste disposal technology is not now, even after all these years, and obviously may never be ready for prime time. Yet Obama plans to put the federal taxing power behind a utility company to help it build two more reactors at an existing two-reactor nuclear plant outside Atlanta. Obama is backing nuclear power as an environmentally desirable alternative to fossil fuel plants, even though his decision will likely damage his pro-environment credentials. The loan guarantees will enable the Southern Co. to finance 70 percent of the new construction, which is expected to cost as much as $9 billion when the plants are completed in 2016 or 2017.